Social Mobility: How to Break the Link Between Background and Opportunity (Joe Seddon)

29:21Are too many people going to university? Yes. Do we have a fifth of people going to university where they probably shouldn't? Yes. To be very clear, when you said that 20 % of people who go to university are earning less, do you mean that's because they're encumbered by the graduate student loan debt? Or do you mean that actually, if they just didn't go to university for those three years, then they would earn more through their career compared to having gone to university and starting later? It's both, but it's mainly the latter, which is the people who spend three years of their life doing a course which actually doesn't give them the skills they need for the labour market are losing out versus if they'd gone straight into the workplace at the age of 18 and started learning those skills on the job.

30:01So it's those people who shouldn't be going to university and should be doing something like an apprenticeship instead. But this is a whole different topic. And apprenticeships is also a system that is very, very broken as well, despite politicians liking to present it as a silver bullet to everything. But the point is, if we're going to make education, higher education, universal, there has to be a big clamp down on poor quality. And that 20%, which is a huge number of people, by the way, a huge number of institutions, huge amount of effort, just fuss, and you think about what we're talking about there, which is, as you say, of limited economical educational value.

30:38Back in the day, there used to be a dismissive term where people say, oh, the old golf course management. Actually, golf course management might have been an eccentric course at some university at some point. I don't know if it still exists. If you're currently studying golf course management, feel free to send us a voice note. But what are you talking about there? Are you talking about, for instance, the old polytechnic, some of which were recast as universities? Are you talking about strange courses at top universities that ought not to be at those universities because they're bringing those universities down?

31:05Are you talking about things in more vocational courses, sports and drama? What constitutes, because there'll be people listening to you right now, Joe, who are thinking, a few months time, I was thinking about going to university. I'm listening to Joe Seddon. I'm from a working class background in West Yorkshire. And I'm thinking, what the hell am I doing? I haven't got a place at Oxford. Maybe I should go and be an electrician. Maybe I should go out to America and try and get one of those jobs in the data centre where my wages will go up. And by the way, I'm not paying 71 % marginal tax. So let's be really clear about this.

31:32I want this to be useful consumer advice almost. Though, you know, I'm sure you'd say talk to lots of people before you make a decision. What is that 20 % of universities that needs to be clamped down on? So it's both the university institution and the degree course. So in the UK, on average, if you go to your university you get around 130 000 pounds boost over your lifetime in terms of the income that you're able to generate however that is an average which disguises a huge amount of variation so if you go to a russell group university in the uk and study a degree course like economics or medicine you're talking a boost of like 400 500 000 pounds like a really really big boost whilst if you go to a less selective university and study a degree um like english literature like the boost can sometimes be negative like you can fall into that one in five people like i said so i think it's not just about institution it's about degree course as well and the first thing the government could do to actually tackle this is just lean into radical transparency when people are applying to university you know through ucas and getting their offer we should be telling people the data on that piece of paper before they accept that 50 000 pounds of student debt we should be telling them i love a radical idea come on if you do this course on average people who did this are going to earn x amount more over their lifetime or x amount less that should be there on paper before you sign on dotted line say i'm going to take out this debt does that data exist sorry to do does that data exist yes it does exist but obviously the less selective universities and the leaders of the degree courses where there's limited economic value do not like this data to be uh put in front of students because it would make them second guess if they want to go to university or not and we should be radically transparent because even if you're a student who it does want to do one of those courses um and and it's not going to be economically beneficial some of them might still say i want to go to university because i want the experience and i'm actually really interested in this subject and i'm okay with the fact it's not going to make me better off and that's that's okay as long as you've actually got the information isn't the truth that if you did if you were radically transparent some universities would go under if we were radically transparent much fewer people would go to university and we would see a lot of less selective universities and certain departments and degree courses go under that's for sure i think like you said even though that creates a huge amount of disruption it's every government's nightmare to have a university go under and not have students be able to turn up at their graduation ceremony and get their nice degree classification even though it's every government's nightmare it's something in the long term which i think would make for a better system of sociability in the UK as long as there are the pathways there to replace it for those people who are no longer going to university and the thing that really worries me is that this apprenticeship system that politicians love to talk about is not fit for purpose either I really want to talk to you about apprenticeships I actually want to get into your backstory because it's riveting just before we do that it's a bit awkward isn't it if you're someone who didn't grow up rich but you've had the benefit of going to one of the world's greatest institutions of Oxford for three years in those beautiful buildings.

34:40I had three years in another place a few hundred miles away. It's a, I mean, two things can be true at the same time. On the one hand, university can be this golden ticket, this magical experience, this formative halcyon period for some people. And at the same time, you can think other people are wasting their time at university. It's a bit awkward. Doesn't it make you feel a bit queasy because you could be accused joe seddon of having had a wonderful time at oxford and then here you are pulling up the drawbridge saying that young uh you know young uh you know toby from wherever or young lucy from wherever ought not to go to a university just because she hasn't got as good grades as you absolutely not because what i want to see is an absolute radical change in who actually goes to these highly selective universities and that's what i've committed my life to.

35:26I want to make it possible for working class kids across the country to go to your Oxfords, your Imperials, your Leeds, your Manchesters. What I don't want to do is mislead working class people to make them make poor choices that make it really difficult to be socially mobile over the long term. I think it's a luxury belief, to be honest, amongst academics to sort of tell this fantasy story about going to less selective universities and make it out to be this silver bullet for university and therefore lead to a life for a lot of their students which is not economically beneficial that's a luxury belief and i can tell you having been to oxford for three years there's plenty of affluent students there who love luxury beliefs telling people the way the world should work and then doing something completely different in their own personal life i'm not one of those people i'll say it how it is i'm from yorkshire i'll be direct and blunt even people might accuse me of saying something that is unsavory

36:25I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Yorkshire's Joe Seddon. I'm going to call him Yorkshire's Joe Seddon because that's very much how he identifies himself, his brand. If you are enjoying this, in fact, even if you're not, but I know you are, please subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. And that way you will get an alert whenever we release a new episode. That way you'll never miss out. Thank you so much. And now back to Joe Seddon.

36:57If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

37:38Let's talk about how you came to go through this. So you grew up in Morley. um your father didn't inherit many a stately home your mum tell us where they came from what they did sure so i grew up in morley in west yorkshire which is a sort of suburban post-industrial town between leeds and wakefield um i was brought up a single parent family my mum worked as a speech therapist in the nhs in rotherham and i made the journey you know through state schools to oxford university which was a crazy thing for something like me because as i mentioned earlier in the year I graduate from Oxford not a single person in the parliamentary constituency I grew up in and I got a place at the university it was actually the BBC in many ways that put me on the path to Oxbridge because I was one of those unlucky students who on GCSE results day was pushed in front of the local radio by their school and I had to open my results on BBC radio leads and I got a good set of GCSE results and the interviewer Richard asked me he said do you are you going to give Oxbridge a go and how do you feel about this being a sort of kid from a state school in West Yorkshire and I sort of froze live on radio because the idea of going to Oxbridge had never even passed my mind before it's a completely alien concept even going to university was quite novel and even though that moment was sort of uh embarrassing in a way it did sort of plant the seed of an idea where afterwards I thought maybe I should give this a shot so I sort of googled on YouTube and how to get into to Oxbridge and then sort of took it from there so the BBC in many ways put me on a completely different track in life and then did you how did you feel when you got to Oxford was there a sense in which you kind of your world these vast you know Hogwarts-ish buildings these people with posher accents than you perhaps people who went to different schools and whose parents used to run great institutions I mean how did all that feel for you it did sort of feel a little bit like a movie where you sort of you stood there on the train platform with all your belongings stuffed into your case and the train arrives and you think am i about to take off into a completely different world and it was a completely different world and like the imposter syndrome which everyone talks about is very real i think the thing that's not spoken about enough is is what i call sociability guilt which is the the flip side of that dynamic around not fitting in which is as you move into a kind of different environment especially one which is seen as sort of prestigious or elite you're also at the same time kind of estranging yourself from some of those kind of values ideas principles people that you grew up with and i remember sort of feeling that really strongly when i started at oxford because family members and my friends from back home would joke that you're going to be you know going off with the posh shows now and you're going to be sort of skiing holidays and trips to the opera and you come back sounding posh basically is your accent going to change and and the dark thing is that it's actually true which is if you move into an elite environment your interests are going to naturally change your social circles are going to change but it does sort of make you feel a huge sense of guilt because you think that you don't want to sort of lose connections with the things that made you who you are and that was the thing that was actually on my mind more so than the imposter syndrome of the environment that i was going uh into and it took me probably a good three or four years to get past that and get into a kind of mindset where i was actually able to reconcile okay i like these weird things now like reading philosophy books and you know looking at economics videos on youtube but i'm also still a kind of guy from yorkshire i love football and i go see my team whole city play every week and i like having pints with my mates it's like those things that made me who i am are still there as well but it took years to sort of reconcile those two things together do you feel you have in some sense betrayed your roots so i Betraying is a heavy word.

41:23You know what I'm saying. I can understand why people might see that. I would say that as long as you stay true to your fundamental values, then you're not betraying anything. You're just evolving with the times. And a bit like you said today, if I went from being the sort of straight-talking Yorkshireman to the sort of very diplomatic, soft-spoken Southerner as a result of my time at Oxbridge, people very well would have been able to say, well, you've changed. You've fundamentally changed who you are. I've tried to keep my fundamental values and principles the same, even as my skin in some ways has shedded over time to have new interests, new people, new social circles.

42:01So you've got to find a way to reconcile those two things. If you can do that, you're not betraying your roots. So I mentioned your accent, and I think accents are possibly the most interesting subject of them all in Britain. I mean, it's just so interesting. After I did How to Crack the Class Ceiling, I got huge numbers. I don't want to put a number on it, but many, many, many, many hundreds of messages from people pouring their hearts out, explaining how they felt that their accent had held them back in their life. And what's so interesting is there is an accent hierarchy. Lots of people like a group at Queen Mary's called Accent Bias Britain have looked at this at great length.

42:32Here's such a crazy thing. Of all the regional accents, your Yorkshire accent is among the most trusted. And yet people who grew up from in Hull, very poor, not very far from you. How far is Hull from Morley? It's like 60 minutes. East Yorkshire versus West Yorkshire. It's such a curious thing. Why is, what's this? Why is, why is, so you're West Yorkshire. Yeah. Why is West Yorkshire so trusted and a source of pride? And you speak with great confidence, if I may say, I think your elocution, your cogency, your oracy is extraordinary, exceptional, persuasive. And yet people 60 minutes away, they get crippled psychologically.

43:12They don't apply for certain jobs they don't make certain connections they don't go to certain universities why is that you can actually see this play out very uh viscerally in advertising which is like you said the west yorkshire accent is known for being very authentic and trustworthy truth telling so every single advert for like a tea company is always with a yorkshire accent in the uh in the background is that harold wilson do you think what is that about why is the yorkshire accent so trusted west yorkshire i i think because it's associated with authenticity so like people from yorkshire because they do have that reputation of being kind of straight talking truth tellers no say it as you see it i think that's how the accent has come to be associated over over time and i think the difficult thing is it's really difficult to change your accent it's like your accent can change naturally over time as a result of surrounding yourself with different people but so what i would say is don't try and change your accent like don't try and live in this pygmalion world what you've got to do and i know this sounds brutal is you've got to try and find a way to turn your accent and your identity into your competitive advantage like can you turn it into your brand and that's what i have done implicitly over time like i lean into the yorkshire stuff whenever i then meet people for the first time or come on a podcast i always tell my foundation story about being from west yorkshire i always speak in a very blunt straight talking way and yes that's natural but also part of it i suppose is tactical as well because that is the personal brand that i've built and then people suddenly sort of put me in the box of oh this is an interesting straight talking yorkshireman rather than the box of oh this is a kind of no just working class bloke from yorkshire and oh can we shouldn't listen to what he where does that come from i i think getting into oxford i think confidence comes from doing things and seeing the results happen in your life it's a feedback loop which is why it's natural for so many people from working class backgrounds to be absolutely lacking in confidence because the story of many working class people is you try really hard to do all the right things and it doesn't come off now I was lucky that I got a few breaks you know partly through hard work and talent but also through serendipity as well if I didn't have that BBC radio interview maybe I would never would have gotten to Oxford so I got that feedback loop and my question is how do we get that feedback loop group going for working class people where for too many of them it hasn't been and i think the reason this is a really interesting topic as well is the interrelation with ethnicity which is there's been a lot of talk in the media regarding why brits from white working class backgrounds do so much worse in terms of educational and career outcomes versus other groups i think one of the reasons for this is actually that feedback loop which is if you've seen your parents your grandparents your great-grandparents grow up and live in the uk and their lives have been characterized by doing all the right things but not getting the right economic outcomes as a result of it that is naturally going to lead to embedded cynicism in your family whilst if you're a first generation immigrant who's moved to the uk for a better life been welcomed by the country and you've managed to find a way into it know your job in the uk or whatever it is you've got that natural almost like aspirational capital that you still think the world could be your oyster i think that is one of the main cultural reasons we do see that gap between the white working class in the uk but also ethnic groups who've actually got this right you've been accepted you know i mean i was i came i was born in india in 1983 i came to this country when i was three years old i was invited in and accepted by thatcher's britain and you know then i became a you know 1990s kid in blair's britain and there's that feeling that kind of in a way that i think perhaps we're turning against is that feeling of like coming in and make something of yourself we've got to be we've got a lot to be proud of as a country in terms of how we've actually immigrated um sorry integrated people who came to this country in the 50s 60s and 70s like of course we had massive problems but the uk is one of the only advanced economies in the world where people who have english as a kind of additional language do better at school than those who are native english speakers and that is extraordinary when you think about it because naturally you think well people who have english as their first language should be doing better at school and they're better literacy all these other things but we've actually seen that people from ethnic minority backgrounds where english is not the first language in the household do better i think that is because we've done a really good job as a country to educationally integrate people but also because the aspirational capital that a lot of those families bring yeah that means that no the parents are more involved they believe it's possible and it creates that feedback loop over time that wears off in people's lives some people of course would say you know some immigrant groups particularly these days are not made to feel as welcome as perhaps you know I was fortunate to feel Accents gets us into another thing which I really want to talk about before we talk about some of your radical solutions and what Zero Gravity is doing about things that hold people back and that's the great revelation or shocking lesson of the documentaries I made having thought about social mobility for a long time is really the influence of geography and I really want people to understand why the fact you come from Morley is interesting I realised in making these documentaries how privileged I am not just in the ways I knew loving family, immigrant background aspirational capital to devoted parents all that stuff but growing up in london and the uk is more tilted to its capital city than almost any western democracy what have you found not just through your own life experience but through your work in social mobility in the extent to which geography holds people back geography is destiny in the uk if you're a kid who grew up in a council flat tower in South London and you go to a state school, your chances of breaking into an elite university, an elite career, are higher than most of the middle class in the rest of the country.

48:55And in some ways, that is something to be proud of from a London point of view. Now, London, despite all of its vivid inequality, is in very many ways a metropolis of social mobility. But it's something to be really depressed about in terms of the rest of the country, which is, if you do come from one of these post-industrial towns, whether it's a Blackpool or a Luton or places in the northeast, it can be really, really difficult not only to succeed at school but sort of break into these elite institutions. So geography plays a huge, huge role and I think often this starts right from early ages in school, which is when you look at the performance of schools across the UK, London is actually the only region of the UK where schools add value to the average student so the department of education's got this metric called progress eight where essentially they'll look at uh do do schools improve students versus what you'd expect given how they performed in their sort of exams in year six and london is the only region in the uk where students do better on average than what you'd expect and that is a thing to celebrate in terms of london schools and london went from having some of the worst schools in the uk 20 years ago to by far the best today but it's a really depressing fact about the rest of the uk in terms of just not doing a good enough job in terms of educating people at school.

50:08Why is regional inequality so pronounced in the UK? I mean, there's a historic thing, which is that if you look at the American founding fathers had this vision, I think particularly actually Benjamin Franklin, of separating New York as a financial centre from Washington, the political centre, literally to minimise the chance of corruption. I mean, there are lots of other reasons as well, but literally put distance between the money men and the legislators. In Britain, in London, it's extraordinarily concentrated. You might have the historic city of London, but it's a few miles east of Westminster and Whitehall, which is the political power.

50:39But even if you look at European democracies like Spain or France or Germany, they have these second tier cities. Now, I'm not saying Britain doesn't have second tier cities. It obviously does, Birmingham and others. Birmingham being the second biggest. Leeds near where you grew up. But those second tier cities don't really form a strong sort of ring beneath the capital. They're a very, very long way beneath the capital in terms of economic and job opportunity, and indeed, by other measures, health outcomes and so on, longevity. But also, there's not that many of them. Why is Britain so desperately bad at regional inequality?

51:14And this is one of the reasons I don't particularly like the idea of the North-South divide, because it's not the North versus the South. It's actually London and the South-East versus everyone else. The South-West has more in common economically with Yorkshire and the North-East than it does with London and some of the home counties. I think the reason this has happened is a lot of it is macroeconomics. The UK de-industrialized after the Second World War, and that led to a huge thriving knowledge economy in places like London or more recently in maybe places like Manchester and Birmingham. But the traditional industrial heartlands didn't find a way to find that new comparative advantage of the thing they could produce in their region that was going to be economically beneficial.

51:58And that's why I think we've seen London and to some extent some of these other urban hubs pull away so much from the rest of the UK. And the reason this is such a big issue is because it's actually true across most advanced economies that opportunity does kind of agglomerate in cities. Cities are huge cauldrons of opportunity and talent. And there's lots of benefits of bringing all the sort of smart people, money, infrastructure into the same place. but the thing that uk does really badly is actually moving people from suburbs into cities so if you're someone like transport links are so terrible exactly so if you're someone like me who grew up in west yorkshire and you're from let's say you grew up in a low-income family in west yorkshire to get from one side of wakefield to the other on the bus literally takes two hours because the transport infrastructure there is so bad compare that to london where you literally can move from one side of the city to the other on the Elizabeth line in like 45 minutes.

52:55So putting aside the question of kind of urban versus suburban versus rural, we're doing a really bad job in the UK of moving talent from the suburbs into the cities. Yeah, the transport links. I remember listening to George Osborne, former Chancellor, talking about how the idea of connecting Liverpool to Manchester, he said that it would transform the economic geography of that entire region. And that's because the distance, it's just not that big a distance. But if you had fast train links, you effectively create a kind of a megacity, you know, which this enormous economic hub and you get a lot more kind of dynamism going on.

53:28And so when you hear these conversations about HS2, which I think the latest, I can't remember the latest, they are going to start building, but it's going to be 2045. And this is an idea that in 2010, it's literally taking this country 35 years, tens of billions before you're going to see this kind of, you know, even get going. You realise that transport and housing policies, these are all connected to social mobility. You know, there's not a kind of one solution. You need to fix all these things at the same time. So if geography massively holds people back, can I ask you another awkward question, which is a blunt, truth-telling Yorkshireman you can answer directly.

54:00Isn't the truth that when you're giving advice to the would-be Joe Seddons of the future, to navigate Britain as it is in 2026, you do need to move to the big city if you want to make the big bucks? I think when you look at the data there's no way to get away from that you can say do your thing start up in a cafe, be an entrepreneur in Blackpool, fact is if you look at this document I'm obsessed with called the indices or indexes of multiple deprivation in England, Blackpool in the top 10, I'm afraid Blackpool there's four different parts of Blackpool in that top 10 and it's just life is harder in certain places, you do have to move if you want to make it that's the truth telling It's not that if people hold that view, it's not because you've got something against Blackpool.

54:44It's just like, you know, if you're trying to give honest advice to young people, that's where it's at. Exactly. And affluent people, on average, are twice as geographically mobile as people from low income backgrounds. That's another reason you see this sort of class pay gap over time, which is if you're from an affluent background, you're far more likely to move. So let's say you've got two university graduates. you know one's from Hull and gone to the University of Leeds and another is from let's say somewhere in the home counties and have gone to the London School of Economics the student from the home counties from the more affluent backgrounds is more likely to then be geographically and move afterwards into a city where they've got a higher chance of getting a graduate job higher chance of salary progression over time than the kid who was from Hull so sort of geographic mobility and social ability kind of go hand in hand in terms of influencing each other so i would say to anybody who is from a working class background and is ambitious like you should think seriously about leaving your hometown and i say that with a sense of regret because i know it feels like betraying your roots i know in order to do that you are also going to have to make a sacrifice in terms of like maybe not seeing your parents as much as you want to or maybe not seeing your friends who you grew up with as much as you want to but if you want to get on you have to look at the brutal reality of economics in the area in which you live and find a way to reconcile that with sort of keeping those parts of your identity that you don't want to lose what does zero gravity do so we're a tech platform that is fully focused on addressing the problem that we've been speaking about for the past 45 minutes which is we're trying to essentially get students from low opportunity backgrounds into top universities and careers in the uk and i'm really passionate about this not only because my own journey but because i think this is the fundamental problem not just affecting the uk but every advanced economy in the world i think we've got incredibly complacent in the post-war period about our status as the kind of liberal democracies who have all the right ideas about how things should be run but increasingly i think we're losing our way that we've got low economic growth in the uk we've got huge swathes of the population who are politically alienated just a sense of kind of cynicism and fatalism across the population i think the reason for that is we've done a really bad job over the past 30 years of democratizing access to opportunity and to succeed over the next 100 years if we want our ideas our culture our people to be the people who are essentially shaping the world we've got to get this right what i'm trying to do at zero gravity is build technology to actually make that possible because as you've probably gathered in this discussion i'm slightly maybe not cynical but um worried that government intervention isn't going to sort of cure these problems fast enough so i want to see what i can do on the ground as a tech entrepreneur they're building tools actually people use day to day to make a dent in this and i'm happy to say that today now we have started to make a dent we're 23 000 students now from low income backgrounds on our platform who've won a place at a top uk university so on the basis of good information about what that'll get them on the basis of radical transparency but also being given a helping hand across their journey because working with people who've got a huge amount of talent in many ways it's latent like they don't understand themselves that they've got what it takes to get into one of these elite institutions because they're lacking the knowledge they're lacking some of the skills they're lacking the network and we bring that to them through a mobile app that they can use day to day whether it's connecting with a mentor who's one step ahead of them on the journey, whether it's connecting directly with people who work in these universities and corporates to get the inside track about the application process, whether it's using AI to make it really easy for people to apply to 100 different jobs with a sort of really sort of highly personalized CV and answers to sort of bring out their personality and their background and skills in the best way without sort of making them feel depressed because they're having to manually write 100 applications.

58:35We're essentially trying to build tech for good and the reason that's so important is i think technology when it works can provide miracles but all too often technology has been built for the affluent classes in advanced economies so when you see all of the sort of breakthrough tech apps for the past 20 30 years whether it's uber or delivery in the uk these are incredible apps if you're an affluent person but not apps which are going to change your life if you're a working class person who can't afford 30 quid for a takeaway or 30 quid for an uber ride across across london so i want to build tech that actually democratizes access to opportunity not just makes life better for the middle classes well those apps you mentioned others would say as well that they've created a kind of gig economy and you remind me of the great line from uh the the great matthew paris where he said that the pandemic was really a case of middle class people working from home and poor people bringing them things which is which he meant as a form of approbation you mentioned radical transparency just to be clear on zero gravity so anyone can sign up for zero gravity the app is free presumably right so it's free we exclusively work with students from low opportunity backgrounds and we've built a algorithm that essentially looks at a huge amount of data points about your background and if you're someone who falls into the bottom 40 percent of the socio-economic spectrum in the population you are our person we want to work with you so this is not an app for the sort of sharp elbowed middle classes or people at private schools exclusively for people from low opportunity backgrounds and a middle class parent who could hear you now and said you joe said in your class warrior i'd say absolutely not because i'm trying to do this by leveling the playing field not by leveling down so i personally i don't believe in quotas i don't believe in kind of legislating that businesses or universities should take a certain percent of people from different backgrounds i'm all about talent and i just happen to believe that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not I want to do something about that so this is not class war this is about unlocking talent from across the country I'd say to all the middle class parents out there that this is actually something that in a positive some world can be good for you and your kids you shouldn't want to live in a nation where Britain is stagnating even if your kids are able to get the top jobs because that is a world in which even your kids are not going to be doing as well as you did in their 10 20 30 years time so trying to move from a negative some world or a zero some world to a positive some world is what sociability is all about when it's done through leveling the playing field you're going to go into politics well i still need pp at oxford so people would sort of look at me and say this guy is uh on the path into politics i would say in the immediate term absolutely not that sounds like a yes see you back here in 10 years when you're asking for my vote exactly i don't want to give a diplomatic answer but i'd say i honestly believe that actually taking an entrepreneurial approach to solving these problems is better than taking a sort of political policy approach.

1:01:25I'm quite cynical about politics. I think it's really difficult to affect change unless you get right to the very top. So I think the biggest impact I can have over the next 30 years is actually building tech to solve this problem. Maybe when I'm a bit older, I might sort of reflect my life and think, oh, should I give this a go? But I think it's really difficult to affect change unless you get right to the very top. And I'm not convinced that I could do that anytime soon. So I'll stick to building tech platforms for now. You remind me of a line from Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Prime Minister where he says, a cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.

1:01:57And I would say, Joe Seddon, that I've rarely met more of a real realist than you. Thank you so much for coming in and being so radical. Great to be on the show.

1:02:13Joe Seddon is, in the old-fashioned TV lingo, a great booking. He is super smart, super clever, has impeccable credentials on the subject. You know, he knows whereof he speaks and he says it like it is. You know, there's none of this dilly-dallying around. If I may say with respect to our political class, there weren't many politicians' answers. He was blunt. He was straight to the point. And he answered definitively on a number of big issues. I was very, very struck, for instance, by him saying about 20 % of university courses are a total waste of time. They should either be allowed to fail or should just sort of not happen in the first place.

1:02:50He's quite Darwinian about it. And he thinks we should be really honest with young people about the fact that it could be because of the university. It could be because of the course. But about a fifth of people are going to university when they shouldn't. They're either going on false pretenses or bad information or basically they're going to waste their time. And his idea for radical transparency about the average economic value or dividend from a particular course being much more clearly given to students when they apply, I can't really see a strong argument against it. I'd be interested to see what the university is saying.

1:03:21Do you know what? That's a theme I might pick up on the Today programme. But that consistent message that we need radical transparency was, I think, pretty moving. I also found the clarity with which he talked about the idea that geography is destiny really persuasive, frankly. Because as I said to him, the big thing that I took away from the work I've done on this as someone who grew up in London, the privilege of growing up in the capital city from a stable two-parent immigrant family, was the sense in which actually Britain is unique in its geographic inequality, its regional inequality. And something that's often neglected in conversations of social mobility is the extent to which when we're talking about low social mobility, we're really talking about regional inequality.

1:04:03There are certain places in Britain which are just being, frankly, left behind. And he's very, very definitive about that. I also thought, you know, he engaged on an emotional level. He talked about how, as someone from West Yorkshire, didn't grow up with a huge amount of money, single parent household, he got to Oxford, and he both felt this sense of excitement at the future, and also this concern as a bit of an imposter about betraying his roots. And I thought that the fact that he engaged so meaningfully in both an intellectual and an emotional level made Joe Seddon, yeah, terrific booking.

1:04:32I thought I got a lot of clear ideas out of that. And I hope you've got some pretty radical understanding and some pretty radical recommendations about how we can address this issue, which I think most people in this country think is an urgent one.

1:04:48And that is it for this episode. To make sure you do not miss future conversations. And why would you want to do such a thing? And please subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds. You can also watch episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan on iPlayer if your eyes need a little treat. And just to say, if you really feel the need to go on various podcast platforms, give us a little five star review, say nice things about us. You know what? That'd be a nice thing to do. Thank you so much for your time. We'll be back next week. Goodbye.

1:05:44in now and what do they tell us about what's happening in America today? Listen on BBC Sounds.

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